Trend Group

Trend groups are simply logical groupings of generated metric trend lines, calculated from a group of related projects that share one or more important characteristics.  SLIM-Collaborate ships with 18 sets of trend group data from the QSM database, but your Back Office administrator can also create and upload custom trends in SLIM-Suite desktop tools using your own completed project data.

QSM trends capture the relationship between major project management metrics like schedule, effort or cost, average FTE staff, defects, and Productivity at various project sizes. The trend lines themselves show the average and +/- one, two, and three standard deviation metric values, regressed against normalized project size.  In the chart below, lifecycle duration (schedule, in months) is on the vertical axis, and new and modified (effective) size is on the horizontal axis.


 

As you can see, average schedule values increase with size. This makes sense, because there is a direct relationship between the amount of functionality built, tested, and delivered (size) and the time it takes to complete that work (duration). Of course, other factors also influence schedule performance, but the relationships between application size and the major management metrics (duration, effort/cost, staffing, defects, and productivity) are robust and consistent over time and across application domains. Your SLIM-Collaborate license includes downloadable QSM industry trend lines, but organizations with a SLIM-Metrics desktop license can create and upload their own custom trend lines via the Back Office Service to facilitate internal benchmarking, estimate calibration, and risk management. 

In the Estimation Service, the primary trend group is used to generate Trend Based and Balanced Risk solutions and validate current or comparison solutions against relevant projects from the QSM database (or your organization, if you have uploaded internal reference trends created in SLIM-Metrics). Trend groups are also used to generate risk assessments and select an appropriate Productivity Index (PI) value for solution methods where productivity is a solution input. In the Closeout service, trend groups are used to benchmark completed projects and calculate five-star performance assessments.